This Guy Walks Into an Exxon... (The Hidden Friedman)

In recent days critics have accused President Bush and his new chief of staff of doing nothing more than shuffling around the deck chairs on the Titanic, as they shift, hire and fire senior White House officials while the president's popularity continues to plummet. Personally, I think that is a totally unfair charge — unfair to the captain of the Titanic.

Rimshot please! So begins Tom Friedman's assault on the Borsht Belt... I mean his Friday column, Gas Pump Geopolitics (fully available to Times Select subscribers), which enables Tom to trot out some of his classic (but ever relevant) material:

This administration, and its captain, have been staring the iceberg right in the face for years — it's called dependence on foreign crude oil. It has been totally visible, for miles and miles. And yet the Bush team has just kept sailing right into it, refusing to ask the American people to do anything hard to put America on a different energy course.

What is this iceberg staring us in the face? It is the fact that energy, broadly defined, has become the most important geostrategic and geoeconomic challenge of our time — much as the Soviet Union was during the cold war — for four reasons:

First, we are financing both sides in the war on terrorism: financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars, and Islamist radicals and states with our energy purchases.

Second, continued dependence on fossil fuels is going to bring on climate change so much faster in an age when millions of new consumers in India and China are driving cars and buying homes. And that's why renewable fuels and energy-efficient cars, buildings and appliances are going to be the biggest growth industry of the 21st century. The tougher the energy-efficiency standards we impose on our own companies, the more likely it is that they will dominate this new industry.

Third, because of the steady climb in oil prices, the seemingly unstoppable wave of free markets and free peoples that we thought was unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall is now being stymied by a counterwave of petro-authoritarian states — like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Nigeria and Sudan — which now have more petro-dollars than ever to do the worst things for the longest time. They will poison the post-cold-war world unless we bring down the price of crude.

Fourth, we will never plant the seeds of democracy in Iraq and the wider Arab world if we don't also bring down the price of oil. These Arab oil regimes will not change unless they have to, and as long as oil prices are soaring they won't have to. Iraq will become just another Arab state that taps oil wells instead of developing its people.

The beginning of leadership for the president is to tell the American people the truth: This is not your parents' energy crisis. The price of oil is not soaring just because of greedy oil companies. It is soaring because of structural changes in the global energy market that could have vast consequences for America and the world if we do not respond in a comprehensive manner.

Toward that end, we need a tax on gasoline at the pump that will keep prices around $4 a gallon (still roughly $1 less than most Europeans pay), or we need a tax on vehicles that will make gas guzzlers prohibitively costly and hybrids and smaller cars enormously attractive. The sooner and the more we take the price of gasoline up — and keep it there — the sooner we can bring it down forever. If we want to make wind, solar and biomass more competitive, gasoline has to cost more, not less.

[...]

Yes, the president has wasted so much time, but if he finally rises to this challenge, Democrats — who should have taken the lead on this issue a long time ago — have got to work with him.

I'm still itchy to even contemplate working with the party of backstabbers--but the Democrats need to push this issue hard and pair it with the Iraq War as the central pillar of the party platform. Cos this is what it boils down to (via the NYTimes main editorial for Friday):

It's important during this debate not to discount the genuine pain being felt by the poor and middle-class families who must drive long distances just to get to work and school. But their problem is more than gasoline prices. It's their vulnerability to the price increases, which results from stagnating wages and a lack of savings. If the Bush administration had devoted as much political capital in the past five years to wage and job growth initiatives as it has to cutting taxes for the wealthy, these struggling families would be better able to weather higher prices at the pump.